Swami Vivekananda's Quotes On Superstition

In this article we'll make a collection of Swami Vivekananda's quotes and comments on Superstition.

All religious superstitions are vain imaginations. ... This society,
that I see you before me, and [that] I am talking to you — this is all
superstition; all must be given up.[Source]

All the time you work hard and bless somebody else, because you are
superstitious, you are afraid. No more of these superstitions bred
through thousands of years! It takes a little hard work to become
spiritual. Superstitions are all materialism, because they are all based
on the consciousness of body, body, body. No spirit there. Spirit has
no superstitions -- it is beyond the vain desires of the body.[Source]

Be pure, give up superstition and see the wonderful
harmony of nature.[Source]

Come, be men! Kick out the priests who are always against progress,
because they would never mend, their hearts would never become big. They
are the offspring of centuries of superstition and tyranny. Root out
priest craft first. Come, be men! Come out of your narrow holes and have
a look abroad. See how nations are on the march! Do you love man? Do
you love your country? Then come, let us struggle for higher and better
things; look not back, no, not even if you see the dearest and nearest
cry. Look not back, but forward![Source]

Come out and go and wash off. Wash yourself again and again until you
are cleansed of all the superstitions that have clung to you through the
ages.[Source]

Down with all superstitions! Neither teachers nor scriptures nor gods
[exist]. Down with temples, with priests, with gods, with incarnations,
with God himself! I am all the God that ever existed! There, stand up
philosophers! No fear! Speak no more of God and [the] superstition of
the world. Truth alone triumphs, and this is true.[Source]

Drive out the superstition that has covered your minds. Let us be brave.
Know the Truth and practice the Truth. The goal may be distant, but
awake, arise, and stop not till the goal is reached.[Source]

Each tribe or nation should have its own particular God and think that
every other is wrong is a superstition that should belong to the past.
All such ideas must be abandoned.[Source]

Excessive attention to the minutiae of astrology is one of the superstitions which has hurt the Hindus very much.[Source]

Get rid of the fundamental superstition that we are obliged to act through the body.[Source]

Good and
evil are but superstitions, and do not exist. The difference is only in
degree.[Source]

Heaven is a mere superstition arising from desire, and desire is ever a
yoke, a degeneration.[Source]

I want that numbers of our young men should pay a visit to Japan and
China every year. Especially to the Japanese, India is still the
dreamland of everything high and good. And you, what are you? . . .
talking twaddle all your lives, vain talkers, what are you? Come, see
these people, and then go and hide your faces in shame. A race of
dotards, you lose your caste if you come out! Sitting down these
hundreds of years with an ever-increasing load of crystallised
superstition on your heads, for hundreds of years spending all your
energy upon discussing the touchableness or untouchableness of this food
or that, with all humanity crushed out of you by the continuous social
tyranny of ages — what are you? And what are you doing now? . . .
promenading the sea-shores with books in your hands — repeating
undigested stray bits of European brainwork, and the whole soul bent
upon getting a thirty-rupee clerkship, or at best becoming a lawyer —
the height of young India's ambition — and every student with a whole
brood of hungry children cackling at his heels and asking for bread! Is
there not water enough in the sea to drown you, books, gowns, university
diplomas, and all?

If you want your nation to live, keep away from all these things. The
only test of good things is that they make us strong. Good is life, evil
is death. These superstitious ideas are springing like mushrooms in
your country, and women wanting in logical analysis of things are ready
to believe them. It is because women are striving for liberation, and
women have not yet established themselves intellectually. One gets by
heart a few lines of poetry from the top of a novel and says she knows
the whole of Browning. Another attends a course of three lectures and
then thinks she knows everything in the world. The difficulty is that
they are unable to throw off the natural superstition of women. They
have a lot of money and some intellectual learning, but when they have
passed through this transition stage and get on firm ground, they will
be all right. But they are played upon by charlatans. Do not be sorry; I
do not mean to hurt anyone, but I have to tell the truth. Do you not
see how open you are to these things? Do you not see how sincere these
women are, how that divinity latent in all never dies? It is only to
know how to appeal to the Divine.[Source]

It is harder still to knock off old superstitions, very hard; they do
not die easily. With all his education, even the learned man becomes
frightened in the dark -- the nursery tales come into his mind, and he
see ghosts.[Source]

It is very hard to believe in reason and follow truth. This whole world
is full either of the superstitious or of half-hearted hypocrites. I
would rather side with superstition and ignorance than stand with these
half-hearted hypocrites. They are no good. They stand on both sides of
the river.[Source]

People have been cajoled through various stories or superstitions of
heavens and hells and Rulers above the sky, towards this one end of
self-surrender. The philosopher does the same knowingly without
superstition, by giving up desires.[Source]

Place, time causation are all delusions. It is your disease that you
think you are bound and will be free. You are the Unchangeable. Talk
not. Sit down and let all things melt away, they are but dreams. There
is no differentiation, no distinction, it is all superstition; therefore
be silent and know what you are.[Source]

Shake off all ideas of relativity; shake off all superstitions; let caste and birth and Devas and all else vanish.[Source]

Since the dawn of history, various extraordinary phenomena have been
recorded as happening amongst human beings. Witnesses are not wanting in
modern times to attest to the fact of such events, even in societies
living under the full blaze of modern science. The vast mass of such
evidence is unreliable, as coming from ignorant, superstitious, or
fraudulent persons. In many instances the so - called miracles are
imitations. But what do they imitate? It is not the sign of a candid and
scientific mind to throw overboard anything without proper
investigation. Surface scientists, unable to explain the various
extraordinary mental phenomena, strive to ignore their very existence.
They are, therefore, more culpable than those who think that their
prayers are answered by a being, or beings, above the clouds, or than
those who believe that their petitions will make such beings change the
course of the universe. The latter have the excuse of ignorance, or at
least of a defective system of education, which has taught them
dependence upon such beings, a dependence which has become a part of
their degenerate nature. The former have no such excuse.[Source]

Science and religion are both attempts to help us out of the bondage;
only religion is the more ancient, and we have the superstition that it
is the more holy. In a way it is, because it makes morality a vital
point, and science does not.[Source]

The Hindus were bold, to their great credit be it said, bold thinkers in
all their ideas, so bold that one spark of their thought frightens the
so-called bold thinkers of the West. Well has it been said by Prof. Max
Müller about these thinkers that they climbed up to heights where their
lungs only could breathe, and where those of other beings would have
burst. These brave people followed reason wherever it led them, no
matter at what cost, never caring if all their best superstitions were
smashed to pieces, never caring what society would think about them, or
talk about them; but what they thought was right and true, they preached
and they talked.[Source]

The idea of supernatural beings may rouse to a certain extent the power of action in man, but it also brings spiritual decay. It brings dependence; it brings fear; it brings superstition.[Source]

The maniac, the murderer, the superstitious man, the man who is lynched
in this country -- all are travelling to the same goal. Only that which
we do ignorantly we ought to do knowingly, and better.[Source]

The old superstitions must run out. You are all interested in how to
perpetuate all your superstitions. Then there are the ideas of the
family brother, the caste brother, the national brother. All these are
barriers to the realisation of Vedanta. Religion has been religion to
very few.[Source]

There is an old superstition in Bengal that if the cobra that bites,
sucks out his own poison from the patient, the man must survive.[Source]

Think of what a mass of superstition is in your head just now about your
childhood's religion, or your country's religion, and what an amount of
evil it does, or can do.[Source]

This idea of body is a simple superstition. It is superstition that
makes us happy or unhappy. It is superstition caused by ignorance that
makes us feel heat and cold, pain and pleasure. It is our business to
rise above this superstition, and the Yogi shows us how we can do this.
It has been demonstrated that, under certain mental conditions, a man
may be burned, yet he will feel no pain. The difficulty is that this
sudden upheaval of the mind comes like a whirlwind one minute, and goes
away the next. If, however, we gain it through Yoga, we shall
permanently attain to the separation of Self from the body.[Source]

Truth must make you strong and put you above superstition. The duty of
the philosopher is to raise you above superstition. Even this world,
this body and mind are superstitions; what infinite souls you are! And
to be tricked by twinkling stars! It is a shameful condition. You are
divinities; the twinkling stars owe their existence to you.[Source]

We believe in all the superstitions that ever existed. [But] there is no
superstition in the world [that does not have some basis of truth]. If I
cover my face and only the tip of my [nose] is showing, still it is a
bit of my face. So [with] the superstitions — the little bits are true.[Source]

We dream that which we think we will do. So these people who are always
thinking in this life of going to heaven and meeting their friends, will
have that as soon as their dream of this life is ended. And they will
be compelled by their desires of this life to see these other dreams.
And those who are superstitious and are frightened into all such ideas
as hell will dream that they are in the hot place. Those whose ideas in
this life are brutal — when they die, will become pigs and hogs and all
these things. With each one, what he desires he finds.[Source]

We hear everyday people saying all around us: "I dare to reason". It is,
however, a very difficult thing to do. I would go two hundred miles to
look at the face of the man who dares to reason and to follow reason.
Nothing is easier to say, and nothing is more difficult to do. We are
bound to follow superstitions all the time — old, hoary superstitions,
either national or belonging to humanity in general — superstitions
belonging to family, to friends, to country, to fashion, to books, to
sex and to what-not.[Source]

We refuse entirely to identify ourselves with 'Don't-touchism'. That is not Hinduism: it is in none of our books; it is an unorthodox superstition which has interfered with national efficiency all along the line.[Source]

What we call the most arrant superstition and the highest philosophy
really have a common aim in that they both try to show the way out of
the same difficulty, and in most cases this way is through the help of
someone who is not himself bound by the laws of nature in one word,
someone who is free. In spite of all the difficulties and differences of
opinion about the nature of the one free agent, whether he is a
Personal God, or a sentient being like man, whether masculine, feminine,
or neuter — and the discussions have been endless — the fundamental
idea is the same. In spite of the almost hopeless contradictions of the
different systems, we find the golden thread of unity running through
them all, and in this philosophy, this golden thread has been traced
revealed little by little to our view, and the first step to this
revelation is the common ground that all are advancing towards freedom.[Source]

What silly superstition is this, that you ever die! It requires no
priests or spirits or ghosts to tell us that we shall not die. It is the
most self-evident of all truths. No man can imagine his own
annihilation. The idea of immortality is inherent in man.[Source]

Why make life miserable? Why let people fall into all sorts of superstitions? I will give ten thousand lives, if twenty of them will give up their superstition. Not only in this country, but in the land of its very birth, if you tell people this truth, they are frightened. They say, "This idea is for Sannyâsins who give up the world and live in forests; for them it is all right. But for us poor householders, we must all have some sort of fear, we must have ceremonies," and so on.[Source]

Modern superstition

When a great ancient sage, a seer, or a prophet of old, who came face to
face with the truth, says something, these modern men stand up and say,
"Oh, he was a fool!" But just use another name, "Huxley says it, or
Tyndall"; then it must be true, and they take it for granted. In place
of ancient superstitions they have erected modern superstitions, in
place of the old Popes of religion they have installed modern Popes of
science. So we see that this objection as to memory is not valid, and
that is about the only serious objection that is raised against this
theory. Although we have seen that it is not necessary for the theory
that there shall be the memory of past lives, yet at the same time, we
are in a position to assert that there are instances which show that
this memory does come, and that each one of us will get back this memory
in that life in which he will become free. Then alone you will find
that this world is but a dream; then alone you will realise in the soul
of your soul that you are but actors and the world is a stage; then
alone will the idea of non-attachment come to you with the power of
thunder; then all this thirst for enjoyment, this clinging on to life
and this world will vanish for ever; then the mind will see dearly as
daylight how many times all these existed for you, how many millions of
times you had fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, husbands and
wives, relatives and friends, wealth and power. They came and went. How
many times you were on the topmost crest of the wave, and how many times
you were down at the bottom of despair! When memory will bring all
these to you, then alone will you stand as a hero and smile when the
world frowns upon you. Then alone will you stand up and say. "I care not
for thee even, O Death, what terrors hast thou for me?" This will come
to all.

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